His hand shifts, sliding a fraction lower on my side, thumb catching the waistband of my trousers under the jacket. The touch is small and careful, and so sharply there that my breath stalls.
“You’re not faking,” he says. “You wouldn’t talk about edge angles and boot flex like that if you were faking.” His voice has dropped, rougher at the edges. “And you definitely wouldn’t ski on those skis if you were faking.”
I swallow. “You’ve never even seen me ski.”
“I saw your skis,” he counters. “I can imagine the rest.”
Imagination. The word lights up every filthy reel I’ve ever run in my head with him in it. My fingers twitch against my thigh. The cabin rocks again, a slow, lazy sway, and the movement tips me a little more into him. His chest is a solid wall at my shoulder, his thigh an unyielding line under mine, and suddenly it feels like the whole world has narrowed to the space under his jacket.
“This is ridiculous,” I murmur, half to myself.
“What is?” His breath ghosts across the strip of skin above my buff.
“That I know what your Alta Badia second run looked like frame by frame,” I say. “But I can’t decide if I’m allowed to lean on you more without making it weird.”
There’s a beat where I think I’ve said too much. Then his arm tightens again, decisive this time, pulling me all the way in until there’s no polite air left between us. My hand lands on his chest, braced against the hard plane of muscle under all the layers. His heart is a fast, solid thud against my palm.
“If you’re cold, you lean,” he says quietly. “If it gets weird, you tell me to stop. Deal?”
My fingers curl into his jacket. “Deal.”
For a while, we just breathe. The wind booms around the cabin; snow ticks against the glass. Inside, everything is heat and fabric and the slow awareness of every point where our bodies touch. My hip. My shoulder. The side of my chest brushing his with each breath. His thigh pressed to mine from knee to mid-thigh, solid and present.
“Fabio?” I ask, not moving my hand.
“Mm?”
“How long do you think we’ll be stuck here?”
He shifts his head a little, and I feel his jaw against my head. “Hard to say. Could be ten minutes. Could be an hour.” A faint smile colors his voice. “Why, do you have somewhere better to be?”
I let out a shaky laugh. “Not really.”
The cabin gives another small jolt, like the cable is reminding us who’s in charge. The movement presses my hand more firmly against his chest; his muscles tense beneath my fingers, then don’t quite relax again. I become acutely aware that if I move my hand down just a little, I’d be tracing the line of his ribs. A little more, and—
I pull in a breath through my nose, then let it out slowly. My brain offers up the memory of my own voice in the hut, joking I’m definitely going to ask a world champ for his dick, and the gap between then and now suddenly doesn’t feel so wide.
“Can I ask you something very inappropriate?” I ask.
He huffs. “That depends. Skiing inappropriate or… other?”
“Both, probably.” My cheeks heat. “Does it ever… get to you? All the people who want a piece of you. The photos. The girls. The expectations. Does it ever make you feel like you’re not… a person, just a thing?”
His chest rises under my hand as he thinks; he doesn’t pull away from the question. Or from me.
“Lately?” he says. “Yeah. A bit.” There’s a tiny pause. “Why?”
“Because I’m sitting here,” I admit, words tumbling. “Pressed up against you, and I keep thinking about all the other girls who would kill for this, and all the things I’ve thought about doingif I ever got a moment like this, and I don’t want to be one of the ghosts in your head. And I also kind of really want to forget that for a minute and just…”
I trail off because the next words are not fit for a stopped gondola with emergency posters on the wall.
His hand leaves my ribs for a second. For one awful heartbeat, I think I’ve scared him off. Then his fingers find my wrist where it lies on his chest, warm and sure, and he curls them around it, gently but inescapably. He guides my hand a few centimeters lower, to where his ribs narrow and his abs tighten under the fabric, then stops, keeping my hand there as if he’s giving it back to me to decide what to do.
“Just what?” he asks, voice gone rough. “Forget?”
I can feel him under my palm now, the subtle jump of muscle as he breathes, the coiled tension just below the surface. My imagination fills in the rest with humiliating ease.
“Just be…” I swallow. “Wild. For once. Without worrying what it says about me.”
